Medical imaging often includes creating images of regions of the human body for clinical purposes such as examination, diagnosis and/or treatment. These images may be acquired by a number of different imaging modalities including, for example, ultrasound (US), magnetic resonance (MR), positron emission tomography (PET), computed tomography (CT), mammograms (MG), digital radiology (DR), computed radiology (CR) or the like. In a number of example medical imaging workflows, such as in the case of a picture archiving and communication system (PACS), an image study for a patient may include one or more acquired images of the patient. A radiologist or other health care provider may review the images for diagnostic or other purposes.
In addition to medical images, a wide variety of other clinical data may be associated with a patient. Typically, the other clinical data associated with the patient has not been provided to the radiologist reviewing the medical images and, instead, the radiologist just received an order requisition. In this regard, the clinical data was generally handwritten or otherwise documented in hard copy and was not readily accessible to a radiologist.
Recently, electronic medical records have maintained clinical data in a digital form, but electronic medical records are not generally structured in a manner that is convenient for radiologists who are reviewing the medical images of a patient to review in parallel with the interpretation or protocoling of a patient's medical images. In this regard, an electronic medical record, including an electronic health summary report, often fails to include information that may be pertinent to the interpretation of the patient's medical images and/or presents the data in a text-based summary, which would require the radiologist who is reviewing the medical images of the patient to divert their attention from the medical images and to take time to parse and read the text-based summary. Additionally, data from an electronic medical record, if available, may be presented by another system, outside of the PACS, so as to further distract the radiologist from the review of the patient's medical images.
By way of example, the Caradigm Amalga system permits diagnostic users, such as radiologists, to correlate medical images with clinical data. The Caradigm Amalga system may permit a patient's white blood cell count to be presented along with all PET CT medical images, but not to show the patient's hemoglobin levels in conjunction with x-rays of the patient's knee. However, the Caradigm Amalga system presents clinical data in a text-based syntax-driven report in a system outside of the PACS, thereby creating inefficiencies for the radiologist who is studying the medical images of the patient and must divert their attention from the PACS in order to review the text-based report.